CT lawmakers add more money to improve children’s mental health
House lawmakers on Wednesday approved their own package of children’s mental health care initiatives to supplement a $25 million expansion of pediatric, school-based and other mental health services passed by the Senate this week.
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday morning, House Speaker Matthew Ritter, D-Hartford, said the House bill included even more money — as much as $35 million — to fund a bi-partisan list of health care priorities, spanning more than 90 pages.
The legislation passed the House by a unanimous vote of 149-0, sending it to the Senate.
Among the dozens of provision included in the bill are authorization to use federal COVID-19 relief funding to deliver mental health services at schools and colleges, new screening tools for school districts to determine when mental health is contributing to chronic absenteeism, support for peer-to-peer support programs and new funding for the suicide prevention hotline.
The bill would also establish a pilot program in Waterbury to open a federally qualified health clinic where youths can receive “intensive outpatient treatment” for mental health services.
It would also require the state Department of Public Health to develop a plan for establishing a license reciprocity program to attract behavioral health care providers who are licensed in other states to practice in Connecticut.
“I can honestly say that I firmly believe that there has never been such transformative legislation that attempts to get to all those things at once,” said state Rep. Liz Linehan, D-Cheshire, the co-chair of the legislature’s Children’s Committee.
When combined with Senate legislation and a third bill to expand physical and mental health services in schools, lawmakers say their investments in childhood mental health care this session could reach $100 million.
The issue has been cited as a priority
for members of both parties, who point to the surge in pediatric patients seeking treatment for mental and behavioral issues at Connecticut hospitals during the pandemic. In March 2021, for example, Yale New Haven Health reported that 42 percent of its pediatric patients had screened at high risk for suicide, up from 16 to 20 percent of patients the previous year, according to the CT Mirror.
“While there were mental health issues prior to the pandemic, the issues have been exacerbated and the gaps have been highlighted as a result,” said state Rep, Tammy Exum, D-West Hartford.
During several hours of debate over the legislation on Wednesday, Republicans sought to lay some of the blame for rising mental health needs among children with the COVID-19 mitigation strategies, such as requiring facemasks and shifting to remote learning early in the pandemic.
“Our kids, in my opinion, have been done a tremendous disservice in the last 18 months,” said state Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington. "I guess it’s water under the bridge now, but the problem is our kids are where they are and I think that we owe it to them as a state for what we have done to them.”
State Rep. Kimberly Fiorello, RGreenwich, also voted for the bill, but only after she expressed strong reservations about its scope and last-minute changes that were adopted as the House began its debate Wednesday.
“I don’t have any faith that all of these things in this bill will actually be accounted for and that we will sunset programs that don’t work,” Fiorello said. “Rather, I’m concerned that they’ll just keep going and all the new people hired will keep going on, and we have just put in motion this machine of government on the topic of children’s mental health.”
Exum, a mother of three who serves as deputy majority leader, ended the lengthy debate on Wednesday with a personal story of her experience taking a young family member for treatment for an eating disorder at Connecticut Children’s Hospital during the pandemic — only to find overcrowded with children seeking care for other mental health issues.
“They don’t have places to put them because they’re not stable, I saw it,” Exum said. “And when it was time for me to get my loved one out, we were supposed to have someone meet us at our home and put together a plan. No one showed up.”
The reason for the delay, she said, was because of a lack of the kind of intensive outpatient treatment services in Connecticut similar to those that would be offered under the Waterbury pilot program.
That program, which would begin in October, would serve as an alternative to inpatient treatment for children with severe mental health issues, allowing them to go to school and participate in other daily activities.
Linehan said Waterbury was chosen due to its central location in the state. If successful, lawmakers said it could serve as the basis for the expansion of similar programs in other areas of the state.